Whether you vote red, blue, or purple, is that one thing all agree on, is that the political landscape of the better part of the last decade has been what the kids these days call a bit of a dumpster fire.
And sometimes when it seems like the world's going down the tubes, the best medicine for situations beyond our control is to pepper in a little humor. So it fawn awesome, that's just what we did by making a dumpster fire icon.
Just for last. This is F .A .1, story of the dumpster fire icon. Since 2016,
the dumpster fire phrase has become so popular that you've probably seen it on social media and memes and headlines on T -shirts and maybe even nighttime news segments.
An unprecedented dumpster fire. Well, that was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I have ever seen.
And once a word or phrase becomes a part of the average household's lexicon, it's not long before it makes its way into official dictionaries. In May 2016, Oxford dictionaries added dumpster fire to their online dictionary,
defining it as a chaotic or disastrously mishandled situation. In 2018, Miriam Webster followed suit, defining it as an utterly calamitous or mismaned situation or occurrence disaster.
As an aside, there were lots of other funny words that made the roster that year too including ambiggin mansplain hate watch glamping well virtue signaling janky sus a dorkable and galentine's day along with hundreds more so you know given the phrase as ubiquity we thought why not make an icon but before we get into that we're going to back up a little bit and give you the deep dive on dumpster fire And where did the
phrase originate from? How did it rise in popularity? Of course, a literal phrase like, hey, look, that dumpsters on fire held meaning before became, you know, dumpster fire.
The earliest known use of the term dates back to a 2003 review of a remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in which the Arizona Republic's Bill Mueller said that the film was the cinematic equivalent of a dumpster fire,
stinky, but insignificant. Then in 2009, sports radio host Mike Weiss dropped the phrase in an article about the Redskins losing to the Lions, calling it a dumpster fire,
this abomination of a loss. And while it's not likely that dumpster fire was in common parlance in 2003, it picked up steam in the next five years because it was officially logged on Urban Dictionary in 2008,
which tells you it's really official. so searching for this episode,
I came across this great blog titled The Origin of the Internet's most famous dumpsterfire on Entrepreneur .com written by Entrepreneur's editor -in -chief,
Jason Pfeiffer. According to Pfeiffer, the dumpster fire GIF has been viewed more than 10 million times, and according to Giffy, which powers gift tools inside both Twitter and Facebook Messenger.
But nobody had yet answered the pressing question, where is that actual dumpster that's on fire? So Fyfer asked Giffy if he could track back the source and then he made some real traction.
When I reached out to Fyfer for comment, he graciously took some time to describe his research for the article and here's what he said. Hey, it's Jason Fyfer. You know,
back in 2016, In 2016, I was a very active Twitter user, and I followed politics a lot.
I was following all these political reporters at the time. They were all saying, ah, it's a dumpster fire, it's a dumpster fire. And they just kept using this GIF, and this GIF just became the representative image of the 2016 election.
The thought occurred to me, that's not an illustration of a dumpster fire. That's an actual dumpster fire. But I wonder if the dumpster still exists or the dumpster did exist.
And I just thought, is it possible to find this dumpster? And so I reached out to somebody I knew at Giffie and I said, hey, is it possible for you to tell me where this dumpster fire gift came from?
There was a Los Angeles Fire Department YouTube video and the youtube video didn't say exactly where it filmed the video that became the GIF,
who was completely unaware of how popular it had become, saw my story, and he was thrilled, and he reached out. And so I did an interview with him,
and I did a second story, and he sent me a signed print of the dumpster on fire, you know, from his original work. And that today hangs on my wall in my office.
It is a treasure of mine, because to me, it just represents Thank you. we see in the world because,
of course, we're not the fools. They are. They're the ones lighting the trash on fire, not us. Well, maybe even that's a little too judgy. So while dumpster fire may best describe an irredeemable situation and describing it,
at least we can try and have a little laugh, which is something we all could use a little more of these days, wouldn't you say? So there's your crash course in the background on dumpster fire so now to the important stuff the making of the dumpster fire icon here's one of our designers at fawn awesome jori raphael so i am curious about the making of the dumpster fire icon and how that came about what's the story
behind that do you want the fanciful version or the true story. Give me a hybrid. Okay. Jiz it up a little bit. I'm trying to remember.
So I think the truth is, the actual truth, a little bit of pizzazz is that as part of the Fun Awesome 5 Kickstarter campaign, we promised a number of new icon categories.
And as we were building out some of those categories, I'm going to have to double check me because I don't have my computer in me. I think the dumpster is in the construction category or the household category.
You remember? It's construction. It's in construction. So we were building out a simple little construction category and thinking of what to put in there and kind of dumpster as a dumpster icon just came up on the list.
And we threw a dumpster icon in there. And if you recall, at the time we were doing this work and we were releasing the icons for the Kickstarter.
thrown around liberally and conservatively as well. And so we just thought it would be great to add, you know, a dumpster with a little fire modifier to the side of it to fun,
awesome. And we did. And I guess that's not fanciful at all. We added an icon that was a dumpster and a fire, and, you know, we had a little fire icon. We had a dumpster icon, and we smashed them together.
It's a great combo. Fun fact, dumpster fire icon, as I said, You can have a dumpster fire icon.
You can have a, you know, a user fire icon, you know, a poo fire icon. Possibilities are endless. With icons like the dumpster fire,
these kind of little quirky fun ones, we always are interested to see how people actually use them in real world situations. And we still haven't had anybody show us the perfect use of the dumpster fire icon.
Come on, people. How creative. Yeah, we covered a lot of territory around that one bit. anything in it.
Right. Or maybe it's just water. Yeah, yeah. You got some cups behind you. Isaac, could you, uh, the Eminem's, could you? Yeah. And, uh, three puppies. I do. I want three puppies to pet.
I mean, it just, it just made, I feel bubbly. I feel, I don't know. I, it just makes me feel good. I, I, I, it brings a nice energy to the studio. So I had ventured to guess that when you woke up this morning,
you didn't think you were going to learn. deep dives behind the icon please pass it on to your friends if you like it give us five stars write us a review if you got a few minutes you know all that good stuff and so as usual this podcast is edited and produced by this guy right here yours truly matt johnson and the pod awesome theme song was composed by ronnie martin and the mastering the audio mastering was done
by chris and Lemon Productions.